e011: Once Upon a Type

Type systems: strong vs. weak, dynamic vs. static, and degrees of expressivity.

Notes

Talking about type systems! A broad and wide-ranging discussion about type systems in general, with specific examples from languages like PHP, JavaScript, Python, C, C++, Java, C♯, Haskell, and Rust!

• What is a type system?
• What are the kinds of things we get out of type systems?
• What are the tradeoffs with different type systems?
• What is Rust’s type system like?
• What is especially attractive about Rust’s type system?

A comment on the C integer/character string addition example: what’s actually happening there is that the character string is an array “under the covers,” and as such has an address. C silently switches to using the memory address, which is of course just an integer, when you try to add the two together. As I said on the show: the result is nonsense (unless you’re using this as a way of operating on memory addresses), but it’s compileable nonsense. In a stricter and stronger type system, memory addresses and normal numbers shouldn’t be addable!

Links

• Rust 1.7 released
  • HashMap changes
• Introduction to Type Theory
• Visualizing Rust’s type-system
• The Many Kinds of Code Reuse in Rust

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• Aleksey Pirogov
• Chris Palmer
• Derek Morr
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• Luca Schmid
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• Pascal
• Ralph Giles (“rillian”)
• Ralph “FriarTech” Loizzo
• reddraggone9
• Ryan Ollos
• William Roe

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Contact

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